Friday, September 29, 2006

Designer deafness

A few years ago, a lesbian couple in the US sparked controversy when they chose a deaf sperm donor to ensure their children, like them, would be deaf. Now it appears that some would-be parents are resorting to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to achieve the same thing, by selecting and implanting embryos that will develop into deaf children.

This comes from a survey by the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC on how PGD is being used in the US.

Deep inside the report is this paragraph: ?Some prospective parents have sought PGD to select an embryo for the presence of a particular disease or disability, such as deafness, in order that the child would share that characteristic with the parents. Three per cent of IVF-PGD clinics report having provided PGD to couples who seek to use PGD in this manner.?

It is not clear how many, if any children, have been born after embryo selection for a disability, or which disabilities have been selected for. I asked Susannah Baruch, the lead author of the GPPC report, who told me that the team does not have any more details.

So let?s do the sums: since the survey included 137 IVF-PGD clinics, 3% means 4 couples at least, more if you assume some of the 200 clinics who did not respond to the survey have also provided this service. And since the success rate of IVF is roughly 30%, even if each couple made only one attempt at least one child must have been born with a designer disability, most likely deafness, with the help of PGD.

In one way, I find this horrifying. It seems cruel to deliberately inflict deafness on a child, to knowingly deprive them of so many opportunities, from interacting normally with hearing people to listening to Miles Davis. Will such children be happy with their parents? decision when they grow up? On the other hand, I can understand the desire of parents to have children who are like them, and the pride of deaf people in the cultures they have created.

Some will argue the answer is for the US to restrict the use of PGD to screening for mutations that cause serious diseases, as many countries already do. I think this dodges the real issue. Consider this: many couples where both partners have inherited deafness will have a very high chance of having a deaf child. If they decide not to have genetic screening to ensure any child has normal hearing, they are effectively choosing to have a deaf child. In other words, if selecting for disabilities is unacceptable on the grounds, as some put it, that it?s a form of child abuse, then isn?t failing to take action to prevent such births just as morally abhorrent?

Each year tens of thousands of children are born with diseases or disabilities that could now be prevented by IVF-PGD. If you think governments should prevent a handful of people choosing to have disabled children, surely it should also be compulsory for all parents with a high chance of having a disabled child to undergo genetic screening?

This, of course, would be eugenics. But I don?t think societies can have it both ways. Once we didn?t have a choice about what genes our children got. Now, increasingly, we do. We can either leave the power to exercise this choice to parents, for better or worse, or let states dictate what genes are or are not acceptable. I know which option I prefer.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

'Members only' dining

Most people pay some attention to what they eat, based on what they enjoy and what they think is good for them. But, on both counts, it would take a very big shift in my mindset to tempt me into a "penis emporium" restaurant in China.

The restaurant, called Guolizhuang, is in Beijing and is the subject of a brilliant BBC article. For the squeamish, I can warn you that the story revolves around the consumption of dog, donkey, reindeer and ox penis, as well as deer-blood and vodka cocktails, bull perineum and aborted reindeer foetus. And here's a YouTube video of one of the restaurant's chef's doing something unpleasant to a yak's penis.

But what is really fascinating is that the customers are not seeking cures for their ailments based on the teachings of traditional medicine. In fact, they are just showing off how rich they are, according to Nancy, who works in the restaurant. She says most customers are wealthy businessmen or government officials brought by people who want their help ? a bribe, in other words.

The reporter, Andrew Harding, does tackle the tiger penis question. The illegal trade in tiger body parts has frequently been blamed as a key factor in their declining numbers (e.g Sumatran tiger being hunted to extinction). Nancy insists that all her tiger supplies come from animals that have died of old age. Frankly, I find that hard to believe.

But again, Nancy says people order tiger to show off how much money they have, not for medicinal reasons. Would you spend top dollar to eat a dog's genitals? Are there western dishes that people in the East would find equally strange, like blue cheese, for example? Let me know in the comments below.

Ex-smoker?s cough

Ever had to listen to a recent ex-smoker moaning that ditching the cancer-sticks has given them a cough, whereas beforehand they were never ill?? Well, it seems they may have a point.

Cigarette smokers, it turns out, suffer from a less sensitive cough reflex. But within two weeks of giving up, the cough reflex becomes sensitive again leading, I suppose, to unaccustomed coughing.

The researchers, who announce the discovery today, point out that an intact cough reflex is an important defence mechanism against infection, and that their findings explain the increase in respiratory tract infections seen in smokers. Tell that to the ex-smokers!

Meanwhile, anyone know why people who give up smoking are more likely to suffer mouth ulcers?

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Soldier first, human second?

Where does individual responsibility begin and end for a soldier on active service? And to what extent does a soldier have to stop thinking for himself or herself, and simply follow orders, in order to be part of an effective fighting unit

One of the junior soldiers, Corporal Donald Payne, has pleaded guilty to charges of ?inhumane treatment of persons?, including kicking, punching and slapping prisoners. He says he believed he was "conditioning" them for interrogation.

The court heard that the soldiers had organised what was nicknamed "the choir" ? in which prisoners were beaten in turn to elicit a range of grunts and groans. "Horrible though it sounds to say in the clinical atmosphere of this court room, this did become something of a sick joke among the soldiers," said Tim Owen, the barrister representing Payne. Payne is also accused of the manslaughter of a hotel worker, a charge he denies.

But Owen argues that it is inherently ?unfair? to prosecute the three junior soldiers while pressing lesser charges against their seniors ? including officers who are alleged to have sanctioned the brutal treatment.

This is a perennial issue in warfare: the Geneva Convention outlaws the inhuman treatment of prisoners, but how much autonomy does a soldier really have? Senior officers have been accused of sanctioning such behaviour in the past but does that excuse a soldier who carries out such acts?

In order to perform as a military unit, soldiers must necessarily give up much of their autonomy and act under orders. This process alone ? a kind of infantilisation ? may render people incapable of making accurate judgements as to whether their behaviour is barbaric. And of course, there are many other issues involved, from peer pressure and bullying to battlefield stresses and so on.

I think the decision to act in a humane way towards those who are utterly powerless must inevitably come from the top down. If educated and relatively powerful professionals, such as military doctors become complicit in acts of torture, as was alleged a couple of years ago, it is a pitiful indictment of our society.

I think that in order to reach a stage where the lowest ranking soldier acts with humanity, we first need to create a society where human rights are so respected that for a soldier to act inhumanely feels even more unnatural than disobeying orders from a superior.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Pecking towards oblivion

Setting aside land to protect endangered species should usually help their cause ? but on rare occasions these policies can backfire.

Landowners in one North Carolina town have been felling many thousands of trees in recent months in a desperate attempt to stop their land becoming home to the red cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis). They fear that land found to be home to the bird could be designated as protected habitat by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Development on protected land can be severely restricted. So, to pip legislation to the post, landowners in the town of Boiling Spring Lakes, have garnered 368 logging permits since February. That's quite a figure for a town of only 4100 people.

The woodpecker has been protected since 1970. It was once abundant in east coast forests, but now numbers as few as 15,000. It's not the first time the woodpecker has come into conflict with human land use. The bird has previously caused all or part of US military bases to be closed down.

It seems incredible that attempts to protect rare species could backfire so badly ? but at the same time I can see why landowners, who've bought property as an investment, are desperate not to lose their money.

"We have seen some very nice things. If I start going into detail, your eyes are going to roll back in your head because it will be too geeky. So I will just stay away from all that," Griffin said on Monday in Beijing.

"For example, we saw a very nice algorithm today by which Chinese weather satellite developers correct for the apparent motion of the Earth as a result of minor shifts in the orbit of geostationary spacecraft."

As I always say, there's nothing like a good algorithm to start the day right.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Virgin territory

The Virgin boss has announced that all profits from his air and rail businesses over the next decade will be ploughed into his new Californian biofuel venture, Virgin Fuel.

Naturally, environmental campaigners have not been slow to point out the apparent hypocrisy of ?donating? money to a climate cause, while being a leading player in the very industries that exacerbate the problem: air travel and space transport through Virgin Galactic.

But I think they are missing the point. Generous donations to a climate change cause might make everyone feel cosy, but the real change will only come when people take decisions to invest in green solutions because they make better business sense.

And increasingly, I reckon such decisions will be based on the rising costs, scarcity and inconvenience of climate-damaging alternatives rather than the PR kudos that comes with better corporate-social responsibility.

Unfortunately, though, Branson?s decision could backfire horribly. While the jury?s still out on biofuels, many environmental scientists are warning that their overall effects may be even more damaging than burning fossil fuels.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Seeds of the past

Story tellers and film makers are sometimes credited with ?bringing history to life?, but now ecologists at the Millennium Seed Bank in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, have literally done just that.

Seeds collected in 1803 and hidden for 200 years in a red leather-bound notebook in The National Archives have been planted and germinated.

They were collected by Jan Teerlink, a Dutch merchant, during a trip to the Cape of Good Hope in 1803. Seed ecologist Matt Daws says the seeds had been stored in a ship and in the Tower of London. ?If seed can survive that long in poor conditions, then that's good news for those in the Millennium Seed Bank stored under ideal conditions.?

Some of the germinating seeds belong to the legume Liparia villosa; others to a plant in the Proteaceae family. They are not the oldest germinating seeds, however.

In 2005 scientists germinated a date palm seed that was apparently almost 2,000 years old. And in 1994 scientists germinated seeds of the sacred lotus collected by Buddhist monks in China about 1500 years ago.

However the resulting plants were severely mutated. The successful germination and growth of the 200 year old seeds underscores the importance of the £80 million Millennium Seed Bank project, which is an international effort to collect and conserve 10% of the world?s seed-bearing flora ? over 24,000 species ? by 2010. It is particularly focused on collections from the earth?s drylands which are particularly threatened by climate change, yet support one-fifth of the world?s population, including its poorest inhabitants.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Not-so-local lunar library

There's one place you may not have thought to store your valuable computer information. Just look up.

Hollow lava tubes on the Moon could be used as a giant digital library. That's one commercial possibility for the Moon put forth in a white paper by a NASA scientist.

In addition to being able to relay information to Earth like geosynchronous satellites, a lunar-based system could also process and store information, says David McKay.

The lunar computers could be buried in lunar soil, put at the bottom of craters or set into lava tubes, which are subsurface caves in which lava used to flow. Previously, scientists have suggested using lava tubes for human habitation.

Commercial data stored on Earth can be destroyed by natural disasters, wars or fires. In 500 BC, the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt housed records of the ancient world, and the entire library or at least some collections were ruined in a fire. The benefits of lunar storage are that there is no oxygen to erode the material, constant sub-freezing temperature and the Moon is currently free of all of the havoc wreaked by humankind.

Astronauts on lunar missions could set up the data communication and storage system if they return to the Moon.

The Moon could be used like Noah's ark, hosting a collection of plant and animal material, proposes McKay, who made headlines a decade ago when he and others announced that Martian meteorite ALH 84001 had rod-like structures that appeared to be fossilised microbes.

Families could even pay a fee to preserve photographs in the lunar library for future civilizations. McKay calls it the "ultimate time capsule."

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Moving a river

The Muddy Mississippi, Body of a Nation. It?s the longest river in the United States, with the third largest catchment area of any river in the world. And a growing band of scientists want to divert its course.

The problem is that the vast ?bird foot? delta made of levees, dams, locks and power stations prevent the river from naturally silting up and changing direction. As a result the silt ? some 120 million tons per year ? flows straight off the end of the continental shelf and into the deep ocean.

Hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita, which made landfall on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, dump large amounts of sediment onto the land, but for years the Mississippi delta wetlands have been starved of nutrients and denuded of trees.

Despite the sediments dumped by Katrina, the hurricane caused extensive loss of wetland in southern Louisiana, according to the US Geological Survey.

Diverting the river would stem the sediment loss and gradually help renew the shrinking wetlands, said an international group of scientists at a meeting at the University of New Orleans in April. They are meeting again this autumn to start thinking about how to plan the giant construction and engineering project.

Expect fierce objections from those who think that the expense of the project will not be worth it ? and equally forceful arguments that due to rising sea levels the project will actually be cost effective.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Psychological rejection

If you had a transplanted hand, imagine how you?d feel every time you saw the hand of the dead donor. If you were the partner of such a transplantee, it would be pretty spooky to be caressed by the hand of a dead person.

Now imagine if it was an even more intimate organ. The psychological problems of accepting someone else?s penis would be considerable. For that reason, the recipient of the world?s first penis transplant has had the organ removed.

"Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off," said Dr Weilie Hu, of Guangzhou General Hospital China. The organ had been attached for two weeks and had apparently not been rejected by the recipient?s immune system.

Dr Hu?s report on the penis transplant will be published next month in European Urology.

It raises questions already posed by people who have received face transplants: how would you feel looking in the mirror and seeing a face reminiscent of a dead stranger? I guess you?d feel weird, but probably not as weird as if you continued to see a face that had been disfigured by cancer or by an animal attack.

People with heart transplants don?t have to see the organ that keeps them alive, but they sometimes report feeling a connection with their dead donor.

There was even a report of a girl who?d received the heart of a murder victim helping police locate the killer, after having dreams of the man and the crime. Such fantastic stories seem to be part of a new modern mythology that may gradually grow as organ transplants become more common.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Evangelicals to fight climate change? Amen to that.

The US National Association of Evangelicals has gone green.

The NAE is helping promote a new film, The Great Warming, warning of the dangers of climate change.

The reverend Richard Cizik, the NAE?s vice-president for governmental affairs, had this to say about his conversion to environmentalism: ?This newfound passion, this concern for Creation Care as we call it, comes straight from God and the Holy Spirit who is regenerating people?s hearts to realize the imperative of the scriptures to care for God?s world in new ways.?

Narrated by Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves (yes, it?s a Canadian movie), the movie has already been screened in churches in the US. Given that the NAE?s flock extends to 45,000 churches and 40% of the Republican Party, its influence is not insignificant. The NAE is oft credited with getting President Bush re-elected in 2004, in fact.

While the NAE would surely baulk at promoting Al Gore?s acclaimed film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and traditional environmentalists may baulk at the idea of an alliance with evangelicals, it is to be celebrated ? hallelujah ? that the importance of curbing our energy-hunger is finally getting through.

The movie?s release is timed to influence the mid-term elections in November, and the presidential election in 2008. Gore says that he thinks even Bush will change his mind on climate change before then; the Washington rumour mill says the same.

Anthony met up with representatives of the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group in Uganda responsible for the murder, torture, rape and displacement of millions over its 19-year campaign. The reason? The LRA have made their base in the Garamba national park, on the Democratic Republic of Congo side of the Ugandan border, the last refuge of the critically endangered northern white rhino.

Anthony told the LRA of the extreme plight of the rhino. The officials, who said they had ?strong cultural ties to wildlife? - if not to their fellow humans - agreed to protect the rhino and to allow the park rangers to patrol in safety.

In a dangerous world, such desperate measures are becoming more necessary. Indeed, Anthony himself has history of putting wildlife before personal safety. In 2003, just after the US invasion, he entered Baghdad to rescue animals from its bombed out zoo. It?s no surprise that Hollywood is said to be interested in making a film of his story.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Brain power

The idea that the ability to consume more energy allows species to evolve bigger brains has been largely neglected for two decades because of a 1989 analysis that failed to link brain size and metabolism.

But now a new study, appearing in Biology Letters, looking at the brain mass and resting metabolic rate of 347 mammalian species ? nearly twice the number of the earlier analysis ? has found a significant relationship between the two. It confirms the intuitive notion that, after taking body weight into account, animals with bigger brains generally consume energy at higher rates than their pea-brained counterparts.

Although they lack sufficient evidence to establish a causal link, the researchers speculate that the ability of primates to have this higher relative metabolism to other species could explain how humans and chimps evolved such big brains.

?It?s not the sexiest explanation as to why we evolved a bigger brain,? says Carel van Shaik of the University of Zurich-Irchel in Switzerland.

?It?s not the whole explanation,? adds his co-author, Karin Isler, explaining that other factors, such as the competitive advantage of having a large brain that can process information quickly, likely influenced its evolution in primates.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Hubble's troubles boil and bubble

Hubble fans will have to wait just a little bit longer to find out the fate of their beloved telescope. NASA says it will announce its decision on whether to send one more space shuttle to service and upgrade the orbital observatory in November.

He argued that crews could not take refuge on the International Space Station if something went wrong at the telescope. But without a servicing mission, the telescope was expected to die in 2007. Now, telescope managers have managed to extend its life expectancy into 2008 by purposely shutting down one of its pointing gyroscopes.

Still, many astronomers and members of the public have been lobbying to give it a new lease on life with a proper shuttle servicing mission ? a possibility current NASA chief Mike Griffin has been considering.

"We have clearly been trying to find a way to fix Hubble, rather than to find a way or find reasons why we can't, but we are not done yet," Griffin to New Scientist

He says the final decision will come after the space shuttle Atlantis, now docked at the space station, lands and NASA managers have a chance to study data from the mission.

They will look at how much time it took to inspect the orbiter's heat shield in space and how well these inspections can be done while also preparing for and making intensive spacewalks.

During a Hubble mission, the shuttle's heat shield must be cleared for landing because the astronauts could not take refuge on the International Space Station in an emergency.

And finally, NASA must decide whether it can safely fly such a mission with the existing foam ramps on the shuttle's external fuel tank or whether it needs to redesign them. Foam from these "ice/frost" ramps can come off during launch, potentially endangering the crew if it hits the orbiter. A redesign of the ramps is scheduled to fly in spring 2007.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Put those skeletons in the closet!

What are natural history museums for? Should they be for education, for entertainment, or should they, as Nairobi bishop Boniface Adoyo seems to think, be religious recruitment centres?

"When children go to museums,? Adoyo has complained, ?they'll start believing we evolved from these apes.?

As opposed to believing that we were supernaturally created?

The National Museum of Kenya, which contains perhaps the finest collection of early hominid fossils, is preparing to reopen following EU-funded renovation. Adoyo, who is chair of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, is clearly worried and is demanding that the fossils be removed from display, or at least tucked away discretely somewhere.

"When museums put it out there that man evolved from apes, theologically they are affecting many people who are Christians, who believe God created us. It's creating a big weapon against Christians that's killing our faith", he said.

The ?weapon? he mentions appears to be reason. Many of the fossils at the museum come from the rift valley in east Africa, hailed as the ?cradle of humanity?, and discovered by legendary palaeontologists Louis and Mary Leakey.

Friday, September 08, 2006

A state of awareness?

It sounds like a charge the Thought Police might bring, or the CIA. To what extent does ?covert mental life? exist?

It is a question that doctors, neuroscientists and ethicists will be asking, following the news that a woman in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) has performed mental tasks. It?s also a question that will be asked by anyone who has held the hand of an unconscious friend or relative in hospital.

In the journal Science this week, and reported in New Scientist in July, UK researchers have scanned the brain of a woman in PVS and found that she can process language. Even more surprising, when she was asked to imagine playing tennis, areas in her brain corresponding to motor activity lit up.

This is not communication, despite what has been reported in newspapers. There is some level of awareness and understanding but it is hard to tell if there is consciousness; the patient?s responses could be automatic. It is only a single patient, and the scientists involved emphasise that we shouldn?t generalise about PVS from this study.

For one thing, the patient involved had suffered brain injuries in a car crash, which causes different sort of damage to when the brain is starved of oxygen such as during a stroke or when the heart stops beating.

Nevertheless, following the huge controversy in the US over the fate of Terri Schiavo, who was in a persistent vegetative state and who was eventually allowed to die, the new study will provoke debate about whether an outwardly non-responsive person should be cared for. It will also fuel arguments over how to decide when someone is brain dead or not.

And, as one neuroscientist commented, determining whether a patient is conscious or not is like determining whether an artificial intelligence is conscious, using the Turing test. In other words, it is a tricky task, to say the least.

Perhaps the most useful thing that will come of this work is that brain scanning can be used on PVS patients to determine their level of awareness and perhaps to customise a rehabilitation programme. As one of the researchers involved in the study told New Scientist, the message shouldn't be that vegetative state patients should never be allowed to die.

"Sometimes the futility of care is a reality, and to withdraw treatment is the right answer. But this type of study will increase our understanding, and help establish who is in the grey zone," Stephen Laureys at the University of Liège, Belgium

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Eyes on you

Ever felt eyes watching you when you?re up to something you shouldn?t be?

Police in the West Midlands region of the UK are extending their watchful gaze over naughty goings-on by using posters featuring a large pair of eyes, and the unnerving slogan: ?We?ve got our eyes on criminals?.

The idea was inspired by an experiment earlier this year which found that people put nearly three times as much money into an unsupervised coffee room cash collection box when they were being watched by a pair of eyes on a poster.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

When I was 3 I told my mum that my gran had a stomach ache. My gran was healthy and living in a different town at the time. Much to my mum?s surprise, my gran mentioned she had a stomach ache in a telephone conversation later that day. Now this could be down to my acute telepathic prowess, but coincidence seems a better explanation.

Anyway, the experiment investigates whether it is possible to predict who is going to email you before they actually do. It was published in a minor journal called Perceptual and Motor Skills.

Each participant chose four friends as their pool of potential emailers. Then an experimenter selected one of these four people at random and asked them to email the participant at a fixed time. One minute before this time, the participant took a guess at who was about to email.

Sheldrake reports that 552 trials took place with 50 participants. If a correct guess was based on chance alone you would expect of course to see a 1 in 4, or 25%, success rate. The experiment actually produced a 47% hit rate, he says, and adds that the probability of this result occurring randomly is 1 in a billion.

Further email trials were conducted where the participants were filmed, to ensure that they were not receiving a tip-off from their emailer by text or instant messenger. The results of these experiments were similar to the previous trials, Sheldrake says.

So if the reported details are all correct, what is going on? I find it hard to believe in telepathy, but can't see a flaw that would explain such a high success rate. Can you? To be on the safe side, please add your opinion to the comments below, just in case sending your thoughts via telepathy doesn?t quite make it through.

Sheldrake?s own explanation for this phenomenon is pretty exotic, in my opinion. It is that members of social groups are linked through "morphic fields", which connect members together and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch over distance. Sheldrake explains, ?this is not paranormal, just an addition to the laws that we already accept".

Have a heart

Yesterday the US Food and Drug Administration announced a medical device approval that will give heart to dying patients who are too sick to receive an organ transplant. The agency will allow Abiomed Inc to sell up to 4000 artificial hearts each year to these people who have no alternatives. It?s the first time that the FDA has approved the fully implantable artificial heart, capping three decades of research and several human trials.

Some of the patients who received the device in the trials lived much longer than doctors had expected. One retired phone-company worker with a life expectancy of less than a month survived for five months thanks to the artificial heart. But blood clots also formed in some people who received the device, a complication that we reported on in the past and that Abiomed has tried to avoid with technical modifications.

The $250,000 heart will not save lives, but rather extend them for a short period ? which is why the agency approved them for ?humanitarian use?. What do you think of the entirely artificial heart?

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Really friendly bacteria

Glenn Gibson, here in Norwich to talk about our use of probiotics, let slip that he had found evidence that a probiotic, Lactobacillus plantarum, might be able to treat the gut problems often associated with autism. The result was a barrage of questions from journalists which revealed that, while hinting at a promising approach, the trial in question had essentially failed.

In 2004, Gibson had discovered that the gut flora of autistic children in the US and UK had abnormally high levels of clostridia, a bacteria which produces harmful toxins. The use of probiotics to replace the "bad bacteria with good bacteria" might sound familiar to anyone who watches commercial TV. And that's what Gibson went on to test.

His trial began as a blind, placebo-controlled investigation of 40 autistic children, aged 4 to 8. Twenty children received the probiotic and 20 received a placebo. Neither group knew which treatment they were receiving. Gibson said the group treated with the real probiotic showed decreased levels of clostridia bacteria in their stools. And a diary kept by their parents, also described a positive effect on their child?s mood and general behaviour.

The problems for the study began when it reached the cross over point. That's when those who had received the probiotic got the placebo and vice versa. However, the positive effects of the real probiotic were so noticeable, says Gibson, that many parents realised that their child was taking the real treatment and refused to cross over.

So with the trial unblinded and very few completing it properly, Gibson was left with insufficient numbers to scientifically demonstrate an effect. It may be that the trial was a victim of its own success, but science doesn't work like that. The only option is to begin a new trial with a protocol designed to avoid the problems seen in the first.

And proper proof is needed ? Gibson himself warns "there are only a few specific areas where probiotics have proven benefit so far". The danger is that false hope would be given to parents of autistic children, who would be forgiven for rushing to their nearest health food store to buy anything with Lactobacillus plantarum in the ingredients ? just in case.

I hope for the sake of the autistic children who suffer these gut complications that future trials are successful, but so far, the jury is out.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Some like it hot

So here's another addition to the climate change "to do" list ? stop the spread of infectious disease.

According to Paul Hunter, from the UK's University of East Anglia, we should all be concerned about diseases creeping into Europe on the back of increasing temperatures.

So how about a dose of Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever? The disease is as horrible as the name suggests, will cause you to feel feverish, vomit, and then bleed into all your body cavities. The African tics that spread this disease were once kept at bay by snowfall, but with winters becoming warmer, their presence in Europe is on the rise.

Another invader is Ostreopsis ovata. This organism was once restricted to tropical waters but has crept into the Mediterranean, recently causing skin irritations and dizziness in over 100 holidaymakers in the Italian Riviera.

But you can rest easy about catching Blue Tongue; only sheep will be at risk from the painful mouth sores this disease inflicts. Caused by a biting midge from North Africa, it?s now spreading north, happily surviving in the increasing temperatures of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

And while we?re on the subject of stuff to worry about, Hunter also reminds us that huge populations of people may eventually move into Europe, escaping drought and rising sea levels in other parts of the world. They could bring diseases with them, such as tuberculosis. The same link between climate change and migrating diseases has been reported all over the world.

Hunter was speaking at the press launch for the British Association's Festival of Science. Another journalist there pointed out that if we?re going to worry about anything, shouldn?t we be more concerned about getting knocked over by a car, which kills more of us every day than these encroaching diseases? Or is the long term threat the really worrying thing? What do you think?

The agency must sometimes ignore one to pay attention to the other because both communicate with Earth using "X-band" transponders that operate at the exact same frequencies.

That neglect must be especially galling for Spirit, since MRO's $1 million transponder was originally designed to act as a backup for Spirit itself. NASA handed it down to MRO figuring, rather disturbingly, that Spirit would not survive long enough to see ? much less compete for attention with ? its younger sibling. The rover was expected to live no more than 90 days.

But MRO could still make up for stealing some of Spirit's glory ? it can transmit data from other missions to Earth, something it will give priority to after it spends two years focusing on scientific observations of the planet. But whether the adolescent rovers will have anything to say to NASA at that point, I am not so sure.

Do you think MRO, as the new kid on the block, should be taking priority over Spirit?